{"id":597522,"date":"2025-11-27T17:03:24","date_gmt":"2025-11-27T17:03:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/597522\/"},"modified":"2025-11-27T17:03:24","modified_gmt":"2025-11-27T17:03:24","slug":"back-zak-dont-crack-englands-crawley-dilemma","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/597522\/","title":{"rendered":"Back Zak, don\u2019t crack: England\u2019s Crawley dilemma"},"content":{"rendered":"<p role=\"text\" tabindex=\"0\" class=\"is_Paragraph font_caslonIonic _dsp-inline _bxs-border-box _ww-break-word _mt-0px _mr-0px _mb-0px _ml-0px _ff-f-family _fw-f-weight-3048 _fs-f-size-18 _lh-f-lineHeigh3500605 _col-c-grey_600 _select-auto _ws-normal\">Why, then, do England persist with him? The answer is simple enough: Crawley has long been seen as an outlier, with the rare traits of a player whose performance improves with the quality of opposition. As a teenager, he tailored his training to meet the demands of international cricket, working with the renowned Australian batting coach Neil \u201cNoddy\u201d Holder at his academy in, ironically, Perth, and attending spin camps in India. At 21, he was plucked out of county cricket and thrown into a Test squad despite \u2013 not because of \u2013 his first-class record. He immediately showcased his talent against fast bowling when facing Kagiso Rabada in South Africa, then peeled off 267 against Pakistan the following summer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Why, then, do England persist with him? The answer is simple enough: Crawley has long been seen as&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":597523,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5008],"tags":[23382,748,1406,393,4884,93,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-597522","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-england","8":"tag-ashes","9":"tag-britain","10":"tag-cricket","11":"tag-england","12":"tag-great-britain","13":"tag-sport","14":"tag-uk","15":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115622747024246522","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/597522","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=597522"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/597522\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/597523"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=597522"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=597522"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=597522"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}